


Collecting Strays

by frankenberger



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Radiance Anthology, Sad, Too many feels, implied Hannigram
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 22:51:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13087077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frankenberger/pseuds/frankenberger
Summary: After the death of her first husband, Molly had wanted to get as far away from Florida as she could afford to go. Mountains and the scent of pine trees called her north, as well as the promise of being alone for a little while. They had led a quiet life in Maine, and when the man in the plaid shirt and fishing waders approached, her first instinct was to tell him to go away.But then he smiled.***Molly Graham receives a package, months after Will's disappearance and assumed demise. A sad moody little piece, and my entry from the Radiance Anthology.





	Collecting Strays

I.

There’s a padded mailing envelope sitting on the coffee table, beside Walter’s backpack and his dirty sneakers. He was curled up on the couch when Molly got home from work, and he’s still there when she finishes putting dinner in the oven. The glowing screen illuminates his face in mottled shades of green and blue. Still life, with sullen child.

Walter is watching baseball, the sound turned so low that it’s almost impossible to hear the announcer or the crowd. It’s almost eerie, an expectant kind of silence. “Letter for you,” he says as Molly enters the room. He doesn’t even look up from the television screen, and his tone is barely even polite. She counts her blessings that he’s talking to her at all.

The envelope is addressed to Molly Foster, although she hasn’t officially gone back to her maiden name yet. She picks it up without thinking, but as soon as she sees the handwriting in the address box her hands start shaking so badly that she has to put it right back down again. It’s an unexpected shock that causes all her muscles to tense up at once, like taking a jolt of electricity to the spine. Walter looks up at her, but she doesn’t want him to see her get upset. She sinks down onto the couch beside her son, careful not to look back at the envelope in case she bursts into tears, or bursts into flame. “Hey, buddy,” she says, for lack of anything better. Her lips are numb, and it feels like someone else is doing the talking. “Why don’t you put your stuff away before dinner?”

She keeps her gaze trained on the silent game playing out on the screen. The colours dance across her features. The batter swings and misses. Walter gets up and slinks out of the room. As soon as he’s out of earshot, Molly swears a little in an effort to calm down. It doesn’t help. She reaches out to pick up the envelope, checking the back for a return address. There isn’t one.

The batter swings again, strike two. “Fuck,” Molly says decisively, and throws the envelope across the room. It rebounds off the back of the old suede recliner and falls down behind the curtains.  
Down the hallway, she can hear the oven timer buzzing.

“Fuck,” she agrees, and gets up to set the table.

Over dinner, Walter is mostly silent. Molly is relieved, as it gives her some quality time to think about how she managed to become such a shitty mom. It was somewhere between two dead husbands and getting shot by a serial killer, but she can’t pinpoint the exact moment that she lost the knack of parenting. She looks up at Walter’s scowling face, and figures that the ultimate nadir was when she dragged him away from his granddad’s ranch in Oregon and moved them both back to the Florida Keys. The old man gave Walter a pony, for chrissake. Here, there’s nothing for him to do but go to school, fish from the beach, and stare at the photo of the pony tacked up on his bedroom wall. Helluva place for a twelve-year-old.

“I miss Dad,” he says suddenly, picking at his food without enthusiasm. At least he didn’t say that he misses his pony. Molly doesn’t feel equipped to deal with that particular conversation right now.  
“Yeah, me too.” She knows just how he feels, although she’s never been the kind to join a pity party. Time may heal wounds, but this wound is raw and inflamed. She can’t quite stop missing Will, no matter how much she would like to.

 

II.

Molly Foster met Will Graham on the shores of Moosehead Lake in Maine. She was sitting on the shore on a threadbare blanket, watching the ducks paddle around in the shallows while Walter was fishing. The sun was going down, but Walter was making his last nightcrawler count. He was busy reeling in a trout when Will came up and introduced himself.

After the death of her first husband, Molly had wanted to get as far away from Florida as she could afford to go. Mountains and the scent of pine trees called her north, as well as the promise of being alone for a little while. They had led a quiet life in Maine, and when the man in the plaid shirt and fishing waders approached, her first instinct was to tell him to go away.  
But then he smiled.

He was a diesel mechanic at the docks, she learned, and new to town. Hardly the kind of guy to sweep a girl off her feet. But he had this kind of glow to him, and his whole face lit up when he smiled. And when he laughed, it burst from him as if he were surprised to be laughing, as if he thought that he would never be able to laugh again. His kindness shone through like the moon on a cloudless night.  
Walter dashed over to show off his catch, a fat trout still flapping and writhing on the hook. Will praised the kid so effusively that Molly knew he’d made a friend for life. She wasn’t far behind.  
“You should come to dinner,” Molly said. “This fish is too big for the two of us.”

His smile was sweet. “I couldn’t intrude.”

Molly shook her head. “You don’t look like a serial killer to me,” she said. “And Walter spends more time talking to the dogs than he spends with me. I could do with the company.”  
With his scruffy beard and curly hair, he looked more like a lost pup than a dangerous man. Molly could never resist adopting a stray, so she wouldn’t take no for an answer.  
She later learned that Will had the same failing. In the end, she was never sure who had adopted who.

 

III.

“I miss the dogs,” Walter says. Molly wonders what he would say if he knew that she had given all the dogs away because they reminded her too much of Will.

Guilt rises in her throat, and she swallows it down with a mouthful of tuna casserole. Walter is asking her if they can get another dog, and she lies to him. “Maybe, once we get settled.”

She lets him go back to watching his baseball, even though he barely touched his dinner. They can hardly afford to waste food, but the meal was admittedly unpalatable. Will was always a better cook, in Molly’s opinion. Simple stuff, he’d argued. But he picked up some recipes from an old friend.

The thought makes Molly shudder, and she realises that she has lost her appetite. She doesn’t want to think about Will anymore, and really doesn’t want to think about his old friend. She goes out to the porch with her glass of merlot instead.

The sun is setting, and everything in the world is tinged with peach and crimson. The gulls are crying out as they coast on currents of wind, bobbing and drifting on the surface of the sky. There’s a calm, tranquil beauty about this part of the world, now that Molly no longer feels the pain of old memory so intensely. She had hoped to bring Will out here once. They could have made so many more new memories together.

 

IV.

“I have a place out on Sugarloaf Key,” she had said one night, as they curled around each other to fend off the bitter Maine weather. “Sand dunes and ocean breezes. It used to belong to Walter’s father. We should go, escape the winter.”

He smiled sweetly and hummed in agreement, wrapping the feather quilt tighter around their bodies. “Good fishing?”

“Lots of snapper,” Molly replied, nestling her head into his chest to hear the slow and comforting thump of his heartbeat. “Barracuda, if you’re keen for the chase.”

“I like the chase,” he said, running his fingers through her hair. “I’m good at it too. Caught you, didn’t I?” It had been a long day, and his fingertips were still stained dark from engine oil. He smelled like pine tar and rich earth, like some creature of the forest. They were messy and shabby together, and she loved it.

“I was flopping around in the shallows when you met me, hotshot.” Molly smiled up at him. “You just came and scooped me up.”

He laughed, a warm chuckle that reverberated through Molly’s body. His eyes gleamed with mischief. “Are you saying that you were an easy catch?”

“For you, I’m easy as they come,” she admitted, her hand sliding up underneath the grey cotton of his t-shirt to feel the heat that radiated from his bare skin. “Hard to resist such alluring bait.”

Will tilted his head down to kiss her, stubble scratching across her face. He pulled the covers over their heads as the snow fell silently outside the window. He kept her so warm that she barely thought of Florida again, until he was gone. He was her lucky fisherman. He was her sweet, sweet man. Thinking back on it, she got a bitter taste in her mouth. Nothing good ever sticks around for long.

 

V.

Back in the lonely twilight of reality, the sun is starting to drop below the dunes. The pink sky fades to purple, fades to black. The sea air is becoming cold, sinking deep into Molly’s bones. There’s nobody to keep her warm tonight, and she feels like it’s all her own fault. She sits and watches the ocean for a while longer, until the moon is the only light in the sky. Her wine is long gone, but she only wobbles a little when she gets to her feet. One more glass, and the nightmares might not be so bad. Two more glasses, and she might even sleep through the night.

She is halfway through her third glass of wine when she wanders out of the kitchen and remembers the envelope. She would be happy to let it moulder away behind the curtains for the rest of her life, but knows that there is a chance Walter might find it. She resigns herself to the search.

The TV is off, and the living room is dark. She turns on the lamp, and sits down heavily on the carpet beside the recliner. She somehow manages not to spill her wine as she fishes blindly on the windowsill. Her fingers come across the corner of the envelope, and her heart leaps in her chest. She pulls it out gingerly, not quite sure if it’s going to bite her.

Molly takes a swig from her glass as she stares at the seemingly innocent package. It’s small, padded with bubble wrap so it bulges slightly. No way to guess what might be inside. The postmark is from somewhere in South America, dated a few weeks ago. She wonders, abstractly, what Will would do in this situation. He hardly ever got mail, and when he did she never got a chance to read the letters. Most of them were from Jack Crawford, Will’s old boss at the FBI. Those were the letters he tore up and burned. There were others, the ones he hid away and never mentioned. She assumes they were from another old friend.

 

VI.

The life of Molly and Will had been a closed system. It wasn’t as if they never talked about their lives, they just never felt the need to dwell. They shared the good parts, not the baggage. He spoke about growing up as the son of a fisherman in Louisiana, and she told him about life on the road with a baseball player for a husband. They shared memories in fragments, neat little pictures. Molly knew he’d been through some bad stuff, but whenever she pressed him for details he spoke with a certain kind of distance, like he was telling a story that happened to someone else.

On the first morning that Will woke up in her bed, the early dawn illuminated his battle wounds. They both had their scars, but hers were less visible. The type of scars that came from nursing a childhood sweetheart through terminal cancer, burying her dreams before she’d even really grasped the concept of ending up alone. Will’s scars, by contrast, were etched into his flesh.

She trailed her fingertip over the puckered circle on his shoulder. A bullet wound, he said, from a .32 pistol. And here was another, from a sniper rifle. When she reached out to brush her fingers over the long, curved scar that crossed his abdomen, he shuddered. “You don’t want to hear about that one,” he said.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she responded, “Even if you do, I’m not going anywhere.”

A change came over Will as he spoke, like a storm cloud gathering in a blue sky. The cadence of his speech slowed, as if he tasted each word before it left his tongue. A coldness crept into his tone, and an unsettling gravity. Molly saw a stranger behind his eyes, and the stranger told her all about Hannibal Lecter. Will’s friend, the wonderful chef. The one with all the recipes.

It was unlikely that Will had told her every detail, but he talked until the sun poured through the windows and the house began to stir. When he was done, he sighed and looked at her as if he expected some kind of acknowledgement, some indication that she wasn’t about to run screaming from the room.

“Do you miss him?” Molly asked the stranger in the bed beside her.

His gaze hardened, and he looked away from her. “Of course not,” he lied.

 

VII.

The world is spinning off its axis. Molly closes her eyes, tasting the metallic tang of the wine like blood on her tongue. If only the envelope had come from Hannibal Lecter, it would have been easy to follow Will’s lead and throw the damn thing in the fireplace.

On the last night he spent with her in Maine, Will had another nightmare. It’d been more than a year since the last one, but she didn’t want to make a fuss. She blamed Jack Crawford for this relapse, as much as she hated harbouring bad feelings toward another person. Over dinner, Jack had shown her photographs of the families that were torn apart by the Tooth Fairy, trusting that her empathy for those happy, smiling faces would help her convince Will to get back in the game. An obvious manipulation, in hindsight, but it had worked. She could only guess the content of the other photos he had shown Will. Crime scene pictures, no doubt. Blood and gore and mayhem that crept into Will’s mind like a growth of black mould, invading his dreams and turning peaceful sleep into horror. Molly was afraid to wake him up in case it was the stranger who woke, and not the Will she knew. It was irrational, the way that late-night thoughts tend to be. He tossed and turned in the bed, and Molly pretended to be asleep.

When she did sleep, she had nightmares too. Pictures of smiling dead families that merged into pictures of her own family. Walter and the dogs. Will’s protective hand upon her shoulder. She dreamt about the other person who lived inside Will’s head, the dark stranger who used to walk in his place. She had never seen Hannibal Lecter in person, but she dreamed about him too. In her dream he was faceless, a monster fashioned from absolute darkness. He stood before Will, reaching toward him with skeletal fingers.

“Come with me,” he said, and Will fell to his knees. The creature placed a hand upon his head, and Will’s glow faded. He fed upon the darkness, and the darkness fed on him. When he rose to his feet, he was as dark and monstrous as the creature before him.

Molly woke, paralysed by the fear that Will had already gone. Then she heard the voices in the kitchen. Will asked Walter if he wanted pancakes or eggs for breakfast, and Walter asked if there was any bacon. The regular domestic sounds of the house calmed Molly and she stretched her sleep-stiff body in the bed, shaking off the ominous feeling of her dream.

After Molly drove Will to the airport, she came back to do the housework and walk the dogs. She stopped beside the fireplace and bent down to pick up a fragment of paper that had blown clear of the flames, singed on the edges but still legible. It said a single word in an ornate cursive hand, and that word was ‘Will’.

Will had burned a letter, the night before. The irrational part of Molly’s brain knew that the letter had been from Hannibal Lecter, although there was no way to know for sure.

She sometimes wonders if her memories of that last night have been coloured by what happened next, but that’s just the nature of memories. Not a reflection of reality, just a story that stupid humans keep telling themselves. People collect stray fragments together, and turn them into something to help make sense of the things that happen. But the stories don’t belong to them. They’re just the audience, desperate to know how it’s all going to end.

 

VIII.

“Mom?”

Walter is standing by the doorway, looking small and frightened in his pajamas. He could be six years old again, seeing his mother crumble into pieces after he asked when his daddy was coming home from hospital. He has that same expression on his face as he watches Molly cry on the living room floor with a padded mailing envelope in one hand and a glass in the other. He’s not angry anymore, just scared.

“Oh, hey.” Molly wipes her face with her forearm and gets to her feet, tossing the envelope back on the coffee table and placing the empty wine glass beside it. “Are you okay?”

“Who’s it from?” he asks, glancing toward the envelope with shining eyes. “Is it from Dad?”

“No, buddy.” Molly folds him in her arms. “Dad’s not coming back.” To Walter’s credit, he hugs her back. Even if she’s failed him as a mom, he’s not the kind to hold a grudge. He’s a good boy. As Molly looks at him, she can see the good man he’ll turn into one day. The best parts of his father, all mixed up with the best parts of Will.

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “But is the letter from him?”

Molly gives him a smile, one that feels clammy and sick upon her lips. She looks over at the envelope. “No, it’s from someone else. I’ve never really met him, and I never really want to.”

 

IX.

Molly can put her finger on the exact moment that Will Graham died, and it wasn’t when he plunged into the Atlantic Ocean with a serial killer in his arms. It wasn’t even when Jack Crawford came to take him away. He was still alive when he sifted through the Tooth Fairy crime scenes, as he walked among the memories left behind by dead families. He died in the moment that he first saw Hannibal again. They looked at one another, and Will’s new life burned away. From that point onward he was a walking corpse, a stranger in Will Graham’s shoes. The stranger called Molly when he was lonely, joking about dogs and stolen watermelons. But there was something wrong with his voice, and Molly could sense the difference. The memories remained, and he seemed to be unaware that the memories didn’t belong to him.

He fed upon the darkness, and the darkness fed on him. He didn’t know that he was dead already, but Molly did.

Molly and Walter went to Washington DC for Will’s funeral. She didn’t want to go, as it seemed senseless to her without a body to mourn. Just a bunch of people she never knew, pouring their sadness into an empty box. If it were only her, she would have stayed away. But Walter deserved a goodbye, some kind of closure.

At the funeral, Walter turned to her. “Dad did it wrong,” he said. He was crying, and his words came out in big choking sobs. “I told him to kill the Tooth Fairy, but then he was supposed to come home. He did it all wrong.”

Molly held him closely until his sobs subsided, but she never cried.

She knew that Walter was wrong. As much as it hurt, things had happened just as they should.

Will had never really belonged to them, to their quiet and peaceful life in the forests of Maine. All they had was a shadow, unknown to everyone walking around the funeral parlour with their black suits and frowns. The Will Graham she knew was just a creature midway through a transition into something entirely different. She didn’t know if he ever completed his transition, but she had nightmares about it. They were full of skeletal fingers and looming, faceless monsters fashioned of darkness. Fire and blood.

Molly used to be afraid that Will would never come back, but now she was scared that he would.

 

X.

Molly tucks Walter back into bed, halfway tempted to promise him a trip to the animal shelter as compensation for her behaviour. He’s happy enough with her assurances that things would get back to normal soon, and drifts off to sleep in mere minutes. Molly envies his optimism.

She goes outside into the night, and takes the envelope with her. Her walk up the beach is slow and careful, dodging spiny grasses and dry clumps of seaweed. The dry sand crunches under her bare feet, and the wet sand shifts under her weight as she approaches the surf. She closes her eyes, feeling the water pull at her, calling her to wade into the peace of the ocean. She lets the whisper of the waves wash over her, retreating to a calm and centered corner of her mind that is already done with grieving.

Then, only then, she opens the package. In the moonlight, her eyes can barely make out the messy scrawl of Will’s handwriting in the address box. She expects that it will match the writing on the letter inside, but there is no letter.

She tips the envelope over her outstretched hand, and the wedding ring falls into her palm. It’s cold against her skin, and she wraps her fingers around it tightly until the gold radiates her warmth.  
She can’t bring herself to cry. She thinks she’s done with crying. She can’t even manage to get angry, but she’s never been good at anger. In the finality, she feels relief. It’s oddly comforting for her to know that the stranger still thinks of her, that he still walks around with memories of her. Even if those memories belong to a dead man, even if they will fade and blur with time as he works his way toward the end of his story. She hopes there is some fondness there, amongst the darkness. She hopes that the ring is his way of saying goodbye. Maybe that will be enough to keep her safe.

Molly takes a deep breath, and throws the ring into the waves as hard as she can. The gold circle flashes and winks in the moonlight as it falls into the dark water.

She wonders where the stranger is walking now. She hopes it’s somewhere warm.

She hopes he has arms to hold him, and the sound of the ocean to lull him to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Heyyy gang. I know I haven't posted in a long time but real life has been awful for maybe the last year or so.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed my little slice of Radiance. Comments and kudos are always welcomed and adored. 
> 
> If you'd like, you can follow me on [Tumblr](http://frankenberger.tumblr.com/), (slightly less active right now but I will do better) or check me out on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Frankenberger). Frankenberger is my name, and Frankenbergering is my game.
> 
> So much love to all of you! <3


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